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An anonymous reader writes "A research team at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has been experimenting with changing mouse genes and seeing how it impacts their life. In a surprising discovery, when targeting just one gene change it was found they could extend the life of a mouse by 20 percent. The gene the researchers focused on is called mTOR and is associated with metabolism. By lowering its expression (to about 25 percent of what is normal) in a batch of mice they did indeed live longer (abstract). They also displayed better memory, balance, muscle strength, and posture as they aged. However, the health of their bones deteriorated more quickly and their immune system was weakened, suggesting that extra time alive wouldn’t really be worth it in terms of overall health. Lead researcher Toren Finkel said, 'While the high extension in lifespan is noteworthy, this study reinforces an important facet of aging; it is not uniform. Rather, similar to circadian rhythms, an animal might have several organ-specific aging clocks that generally work together to govern the aging of the whole organism.'"

Of course there are ways to 'live' forever...even in the flesh...the question is...how do you want to do it?

Let's run with a hypothetical here: let's say you got, I don't know, twenty different ways to live forever, which I will outline now:

1.) You join with the Almighty in His existence...you are really immortal, and really can't die, but there are some ground rules which you may or may not like, and He is your King...well, in theory He's your King whether or not you join up, but whatever. Free will and all that jazz. With the exception of that one war, everyone is just perfect.

2.) The Super-Galactic Mainframe of Quanticos 337 is willing to swing by, and back up your entire existence to its repository. It's an AI, built by an ancient civilization, that got bored with daily life, and decided that living on as cyber-elfs while the AI went around asking other civilizations / lifeforms if they wanted to join up...focusing on simply being, while enjoying a universe of their own design, which has some focus on merging thought with form. The denizens are reportedly very happy with their choice.

3.) The Earth itself has a crystalline matrix made up of nickel-iron which stores souls / imprints of lifeforms / moderates various attributes / functions of this planet. If you want, you can simply return to that, and be recreated, or, perhaps, 'talk' to it, if anyone on the lower planes can, and ask it about immortality (presumably with the eternal youth / regrowth of limbs / abstention of diseases, but constantly growing in wisdom kind of package which people here seem to care so much about).

4.) You can do the human scientist / Deus Ex Machina / 'Scare the gods' routine, and whip together a handful of wormholes / singularities / whatever, and use that apparatus to keep your existence going for a bit. Helps if you have some uber intelligent friends who are social enough to check up on you every once in a while (haven't heard from Bob in a while..going to check on him...hmm, his apparatus stopped...well, let's see why, check the logs, repair the fault, notify the others of the fault condition, and bring him back), and independent enough to not tie all of those apparatii together (single point of failure == bad).

5.) You could try transcending this reality...presumably with or without any 'help'...and in doing so, cast aside any mortality, or rather the mortality as defined by this plane of existence.

6.) You can clone yourself a few thousand times, either through direct cloning, by using a virus to inject your genome into otherwise unfertilized egg cells (awesome SciFi story about that), using a virus to overwrite everyone else's somatic cells (pulling a 'Master'), or just plain old having some sex. Or IVF. Personally I favor sex...but then, I'm old-fashioned when it comes to things like procreation. That's considered a form of immortality.

7.) You could write a book, a song, build a pyramid, some 'act of glory' to stand as a fitting testament that you once graced the planet Earth. Personally, I consider this a boring pursuit, bit of a midlife crisis, but then, who am I to judge?

8.) You could convince yourself that reality is the Kobayashi Maru....that the logical inconsistencies of this existence can only be sustained through tremendous action on the part of a symphony of minds or a supercomputer, and that the entirety of 'your life' is simply a test to see if you are fit to 'command' or 'lead'...something. As the saying goes, you could live with a man every day for 40 years, but not really know him; it's not until you pick him up, and hold him over a volcano, that you learn things that you could never learn any other way.

9.) Similar to 5, but without effort on your part: whenever your body dies, your point of observation connects with another permutation in which "your" body is available.9.a) The permutation is karmic (aka heaven/hell/purgatory).9.b) The permutation is the same, just further down the track (aka reincarnation).9.c) The permutation is quantum discrete (aka schrodinger-style immortality).9.d) The permutation is macroscopically discrete (aka alternate reality).9.e) The permutation is some combination of the abo

"an animal might have several organ-specific aging clocks that generally work together to govern the aging of the whole organism."

I see nothing to support the idea of a "clock." If aging were regulated by a clock-like process, then it would seem reasonable that you could just stop the clock. "Solving" the aging problem would be just a matter of eliminating the regulation circuitry.

Anyone who does engineering should realize that's a naive assumption. Since there are no animals that live forever, you have to

The telomere-shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and animal studies suggest that this is responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans. Telomeres protect a cell's chromosomes from fusing with each other or rearranging—abnormalities that can lead to cancer—and so cells are destroyed when their telomeres are consumed. Most cancers are the result of "immortal" cells that have ways of evading thi

do you have any idea what would happen after 50 years if no one died? we'd have 3 billion more people is what.

Oh the drama! I could troll like 50% more victims than I currently can! Let's do this!

OTOH, we'd have a bunch of very knowledgeable people who could probably figure out ways to make this work out. Assuming that birth control, greater personal wealth, and women's liberation didn't drop female fertility through the floor already.

...burns twice as long? Having a lower metabolism sounds like it would just be life in slow motion. Granted the increase in muscle strength seems contrary to this and is surprising. But still, a lower metabolism must mean less energy and vigor.

You know what's a hoot. I have (and had) some hippy aunts and uncles that subscribed to these hippie and back to nature magazines in the 70s, and there were these heroes of diet who were pushing low calorie diet for longevity. One very famous one even claimed he was going to reach 150 eating carrots, sprouts and such shit. Anyway, the punchline is that all of these super diet Methuselahs have one thing in common, they are all very dead. I don't recall any of them making it out of their 70s in fact.

As engineer, I have over 30 years of career been confronted with some problems, items to adjust and calibrate, etc.And I can vouch for the fact that in almost all cases, there was a trade-off. One parameter increasing, another would decline; e.g. MTBF. Or efficiency. Therefore, how can fiddling arbitrarily with parameters on a system constitute research?News at 11.Wake me up when a longer life is possible without side-effects.

Biology is several orders of orders of magnitude more complex than the toy-like systems you dealt with in engineering. One single cell is so mind bogglingly complex that you could spend your life studying one cell, never mind how it grew from a stem cell and how it relates to the billions of other cells in the body (a system of systems on a scale to dwarf the entire Internet, in every body.)

You learned a few equations, learned about crystal aging and a few systems to make a handful of atoms vibrate in a sp

This is actually a very good question. Thanks for asking it.It is because I don't see any progress if it could be achieved. Imagine an ever increasing amount of biomass being used up for an ever increasing number of human beings. At times, old age and death is a great contributor to human progress. Stalin and Mugabe spring into mind. If we were here for eternity all my stereotypes, my convictions, my undue biases would be there forever.However, me dying opens space for someone to pick up from me, and maybe

I understand your position and yet, I cannot perceive it to be very logically founded. The mistake that we humans tend to make, is to stick too much to the crude philosophy of 'when something is good, just use more of it'. Food without salt is lousy. Some grains of salt make it nice. An overdose of salt is dangerous, if not lethal. A nice sip on a good wine brings my spirits up. Though if I wanted to increase this state of uplifting by gulping down a few more glasses, the intended effect would not occur. On

After changing one more mouse gene, a crashing sound is heard from the lab.The metal mouse cage is torn apart and there's a hole in the brick wall.People outside the building are yelling... look up in the sky, it's a bird, a plane, superman.. no that's not superman!..it's "Mighty Mouse"!"Here I come to save the day!"

The research may be new, but it encounters the same old problem: increasing the lifespan of a mouse by 25% (hint: it's measured in months) is much different than increasing human lifespan. The last "anti-aging miracle" I read about, lowering IGF-1 levels, provided just as much misguided hope. Mice with low levels of IGF-1 lived longer--surely the same must be true for humans too, right? Not quite... low levels of IGF-1 are associated with higher risk of ischemic heart disease, and may also be associated with greater risk for sarcopenia.

Do more people die from reaching the natural limit to their life, or from heart disease and complications due to fractures? Until a research team can demonstrate that altering these pathways provides tangible human benefit (without a hidden consequence), we're just learning how to increase our favorite pet rodent's life.

... That gene is no longer available. It was seized by the NSA and is being held in guantanamo bay for suspected ties to drug dealing and terrorism because it may somehow be related to the Tor privacy network.

Experiments to breed fruit flies for longevity by only letting them breed after a certain age has produced flies which lived three times as long as normal, if I recall correctly. These had much the same symptoms as the mice: Stronger and more active, even after normal fruit flies would be dead. But with significantly reduced metabolism. This is also similar to how humans who live on a diet that is on the verge of starving them also seem to live longer, but have lower metabolism.

So lowering the metabolism, and making the cells live in slow motion, essentially, seems to be the easiest way to increase life span. But I think it is a boring dead-end in that there is a limit to how much the metabolism can be lowered, and it does not really solve any of the real issues with old age, such as failing repair mechanisms, lack of new cells, telomer limits vs. cancer, etc.

Trying to prevent aging by tinkering with our enormously complex biological process, is likely to cause many more problems the body that we don't know of. It will likely work for some people while creating all sorts of problems for all the others.
With the SENS approach, on the other hand, it's not about changing the biological process to prevent the aging, but rather trying to repair the damage caused by the 7 known cause of aging, with regenerative medicine and other therapies.